Hanoi Grotesk: Reimagining the Urban Pulse of the Capital
(2024)
Custom Type, Collaborated with Đình Collective
For Hanoi Festival of Creativity and Design
Photo by Tân Tân, Đīnh Collective
It started with a late-night DM. Nhatanh Nguyen from Đīnh Collective saw some of my sans-serif teasers on Instagram and asked for the catalog. Surprisingly, he picked the most basic one. He asked me to customize it for the Hanoi Festival of Creativity and Design 2024, and that’s how this all began.
We had two main ingredients to work with: the "Giao lộ sáng tạo" (Creative Intersection) theme and the organized place, "Cung Văn hóa Thiếu nhi" (the Children’s Cultural Palace).
Our job was to mash them together. We used the "Intersection" concept to bridge the gap between old-school Grotesks and modern geometry. Then, we adapted the architectural details from the festival logo—which was inspired from the original Children’s Cultural Palace logo—and baked them right into every character.
Hanoi Grotesk comes in 3 weights. The Regular is designed to handle everything from text to massive display use. The other weights are strictly for the "extra" stuff, like highlights and logotype tweaks. We added some more sharp architectural cuts to the joints then packed it into OpenType alternates and ligatures.
Hanoi Grotesk
Regular
Hanoi Grotesk
Regular
Okay, but why “Hanoi Grotesk”? Honestly, it’s too stressful to add a city name to a typeface. But Nhatanh is way too cool for that, and I think the word “grotesk”, which means weird or considered new in this era, is quite suitable in the context of breathing something fresh to the city identity, as this year theme is Creative intersection.
We also turned the identity pattern into a font so other designers can just type it out for adaptations—no need to hunt for assets. I didn't design the patterns, but I made sure each character fits perfectly in a square grid with the same pixel count and zero line gap.
Screenshot of the re-engineering process for each glyph in a square 2048px em box.
A nice shot of some type proofing by Nhatanh Nguyen.
Credits
Project Manager: Quan Le
Executive Designer: Thế Huy
Mascot Designer: Thủy Nguyễn
Junior Designer: Anh Duy Vũ
Website Design & Development: Tien Dat Ta
Design System Development: Tạ Sơn Quỳnh
Guideline Designer: Lan Dao
Animation Designer: Nguyễn Hữu Thiện
Photography: Đỗ Ngọc Tân
Design Assistant: Bá Điệp
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